Ringfort (Cashel), Killaturly, Co. Mayo

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Killaturly, Co. Mayo

In the pasture land of Killaturly, a low rise in the ground marks out a roughly circular enclosure that has been quietly dissolving back into the landscape for centuries.

This is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a drystone wall rather than the earthen banks more commonly associated with the form, and at roughly 26 metres east to west and 29 metres north to south, it would once have enclosed a substantial area of protected ground. What makes this particular example quietly odd is the degree to which the ancient and the agricultural have become entangled: part of the original wall, along the north-east to south-west arc, has been adapted or rebuilt at some point to serve as an ordinary field boundary, leaving the modern visitor to pick apart which stones belong to the early medieval enclosure and which were stacked by a farmer with more practical concerns.

The wall itself survives in varying states across the circuit. On the eastern side it still stands to an internal height of around a metre, with a slightly more imposing exterior face of about one and a half metres. Elsewhere, particularly along the west to north stretch, it has collapsed to little more than a stony scarp topped with a ragged rim of footings, though basal courses remain in place in sections. Inside the enclosure, the ground is relatively level but uneven underfoot, and a low spread of stones running along the interior face of the south-east arc may represent tumble from the original wall rather than any later addition. A faint remnant of a field wall also crosses the interior south of centre, another sign of later agricultural activity pressing in on the older structure. Most striking is a subcircular pit near the northern edge of the interior, roughly ten metres across and over a metre deep, with loose stones heaped in its base and a low mound of stone and earth sitting adjacent to it. The origin and purpose of this feature are not recorded, but pits of this kind within cashel interiors are not unusual and may relate to anything from souterrains, which are underground stone-lined passages associated with early medieval settlement, to later quarrying of the wall material itself.

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Pete F
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